we have when bill clinton was president. significant cuts in defense and also significant human services can you tell us. >> katie, let me ask you, before you respond to what governor dean is saying. there is logic to what howard dean is saying. i don't happen to agree with it. but i know where he's coming from. katie, let me ask you this -- katie can't hear me. we'll wait for her to get back hooked in. howard, what about the notion that i'm posing tonight -- i've said this a few times -- republicans better be careful. they're not going down your road and the democrats aren't going down your road. you have middle class tax cuts for the democrats and it sometimes sounds to me as an old reagan conservative that the republicans better watch themselves because sometimes it sounds like they are kind of defending rich people. that's their whole mantra, just defending rich people. and i think that's not where they should be. >> i would agree. if i were politically advising the republicans, which i'm certainly not, i think tom colts was right from oklahoma. they ought to get out of the

into law by president clinton in 1996. it says if a person is legally married in a state, the federal government can't recognize those marriages. that's where you talked about federal benefits heterosexual couples get and same sex couples do not. the prop 8 thing is bigger. while potentially it's confined to the state of california only, the question it out there having given the right to gay marriage could the state then take it away through proposition 8 passed by a majority of the vote nurse 2008. having taken that case, the court could get to the bedrock issue. can any state refuse to let same sex couples get married under the federal constitution. it could potentially be narrow or very far. >> pete, as i understand it, let me ask you. this one of these things, maybe the driving one, is defense of marriage act was about paying the estate act. where one of the two people said she didn't have to pay the estate tax because a married couple wouldn't have to. >> reporter: this is a case from new york. a woman named edie windsor who married her partner in canada. the partner die